How Bitgrail Went Bankrupt and Still Blamed It on Nano

The Loss

Which exchange that fell into top five for XRB trading has seen it’s XRB or nano volume decrease to nothing? The exchange in question would be BitGrail. Why? The BitGrail exchange had experienced a loss of one hundred and seventy million dollars worth of Nano. This was so supposedly because of buggy software in the exchange.

The main developers of the Nano team were notified of this loss by the proprietor of BitGrail, Francesco Firano fairly recently.

The NANO team informed the community of the situation through a blog post on the blogging platform Medium.

The team stated via their blog:

“The nano core team was informed of a loss on the BitGrail wallet. From our own preliminary investigation, no double spending was detected on the ledger and we have no reason to believe the loss was due to an issue in the Nano protocol. The problems appear to be related to BitGrail’s software.

We had no knowledge of BitGrail’s insolvency prior to February 8th.”

It seems that this may have been an event that wasn’t recent and was actually amiss for some time now.

“We now have sufficient reason to believe that Firano has been misleading the Nano Core Team and the community regarding the solvency of the BitGrail exchange for a significant period of time.”

The team over at Nano is in the process of gathering more data and have notified the relevant authorities.

“Our team promptly contacted law enforcement and we are fully cooperating with law enforcement on this matter….We are preparing all information we have on the matter such as blockchain entries, screenshots, and chat logs”

The Aftermath

As stated earlier, it seems that the solvency of BitGrail has been in question for some time now and that this recent turn of events was either the death knell of the exchange or a likely story to wrap up their operations in an explainable manner.

Bitgrail does seem to be bankrupt and there looks like there is a “not my fault, it is your fault,” situation going on, with Francesco saying that it is not his or BitGrail’s fault but Nano’s.

“Because is not a BitGrail fault… The truth will come out.”

The cryptocurrency exchange is not currently in operation and will be heading into bankruptcy procedures.

On Nano

Nano (XRB) formerly Railblocks, has been building a strong community because of the speed and the way it conducts its proof of work system. There are no miners, there is no blockchain, it is more of a block-lattice, and they can offer fee-less transactions. In addition to this, they seem to have scalability integrated from the start, yet have to be tested to see if it can handle to the many transactions that have been and are supported on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The total supply of Nano is currently in circulation, and it seems that this loss of Nano would represent an upwards of an 8% loss of total Nano in circulation.

A word of caution

Despite what we may think, it is still the early stages for cryptocurrency, and so one must proceed with caution when entering crypto investments. A general rule of thumb is to invest only what you can afford to lose.

Situations like this, posted by a user on Reddit, is something that should never happen.

“I’ve woken up in an absolute panic. I had almost 15k nano on Bitgrail which was awaiting termination into BTC. I log in today and everything’s been lost/hacked? My family is in huge debt in this was literally the only way out.. My wife will leave me if I can’t recover the loan we put into this. My house, everything will be gone. I don’t know what to do I can barely breathe.. this is the worst decision I ever made.. i’ve never gambled or anything.. I just really believed in Nano. Will I get anything back from this? Is all my money gone? Please someone explain to me, I can’t lose my family.”

In any form of investment only place amounts that you can afford to lose.